Friends Forever
by Emma-Lee Clear
Summary: In the summer after fifth year Harry is contacted by his childhood best friend and is asked a favour that will change his life forever.
1. Chapter 1

FRIENDS FOREVER

**FRIENDS FOREVER**

**Summary: **In the summer after fifth year Harry is contacted by his childhood best friend and is asked a favour that will change is life forever.

**Disclaimer: **I own Danielle and Luke but everything else belongs to JKR.

**CHAPTER ONE**

Harry sat under a tree in a nearby reserve brooding. He had been brooding for nearly two weeks now, ever since he had practically gotten his godfather killed and Dumbledore had forced him to return to the place he hated more than anywhere else on earth – his aunt and uncle's home in Surrey and the way he was feeling now he wasn't sure that he could ever be happy again. He was getting almost daily letters from his friends and the Order saying that they were all sharing his pain over Sirius' death but rather than comfort him they just served to depress Harry even more and to infuriate him. They may be upset but at least they got to be together where they could support each other and talk it through while he was stuck in muggle hell with people that would like nothing more than to see him die a slow, torturous death.

Give him Voldemort any day.

Harry wanted to talk about it but at the same time he didn't. In some ways he would prefer to talk to someone that was totally removed from the situation and hadn't known Sirius at all. He didn't want someone that would tell him that none of it had been his fault – because he knew that it was – but he wanted a neutral party that would help him sort through the mess and work out how he was supposed to go on. He loved his friends to death but he was painfully aware of the fact that they were going to attack him with platitudes about how Sirius wouldn't have wanted him to be upset and that he had to pick up the pieces just like that and move on.

There was a rustle of leaves beside him and a small child, maybe six or seven years old scampered away from him as fast as his little legs would take him. Harry watched him go and sighed ruefully; all too aware of the fact that he wasn't going to get the support he was desperate for, especially here in Surrey. The Dursleys had seen to it years ago that everyone in the neighbourhood was scared of him – not that he was going to get any support at all. When he finally got away from this hellhole he would be taken to the Burrow or Grimmauld Place and then back to Hogwarts, both of which would be filled with people who would be quick to throw sickening sweetness his way.

Life really sucked sometimes and this was without a doubt one of those moments.

He tensed and automatically reached for his wand as there was another rustle of leaves behind him. He checked and saw that the little boy from before had gone and rejoined his friends on the other side of the park. Surely they wouldn't have left any one of their number behind him – after all they were all supposed to be terrified of him. Best case scenario it was some other unsuspecting muggle – worst case scenario it was a deatheater. Thanks to the extra wards that Dumbledore had placed around Privet Drive Voldemort's supporters shouldn't be able to get anywhere near the house. The headmaster had acted like Harry should be grateful for the fact that even though he had to go back to Privet Drive he could still venture twenty five whole meters further away from the house thanks to the extra wards. The old man would be in for a shock if he ever ventured into Harry's mind because of all his friends and the Order it was Dumbledore that Harry was harbouring the most bitterness for. Come to think of it Harry wouldn't but legimincy past the old man. Dumbledore interfered in every other aspect of Harry's life so why would he stop at Harry's thoughts?

The leaves rustled again and he heard a branch snap. Harry jumped to his feet and pulled his wand clear out of his pocket. If it was a muggle they were going to be in for a hell of a shock and he didn't feel in the slightest bit guilty about it – after all they shouldn't be spying on him. "Who's there?" he demanded in a cold voice. More rustling leaves were the only response that he got. "Don't make me come in there and look," Harry snarled. "Believe me I'm not in the mood to play games and if I have to come in there you'll regret it."

Finally the branches parted and a teenage girl clutching a bundle that he realised was a baby. She looked really ill and Harry was pretty sure she was too sick to cause him any harm but he didn't lower his wand yet. It could be some kind of elaborate ruse to attack him when his defences were down. The girl looked at him with tears in her eyes and a tiny smile tugging at her lips in spite of the fact she looked close to collapse. "Harry," she whispered.

Harry wasn't sure whether he had just had his suspicions that she was a deatheater and happily trying to kill him confirmed or whether she was on his side and was just glad to see him. Either way he had definitely seen her somewhere before – she was hauntingly familiar, especially her sky blue eyes that if she was healthy Harry imagined would be glowing. "Who are you?" he asked, however he spoke much more gently than he had before and lowered his wand even though he didn't put it away yet.

The girl spoke in a whisper. "Don't you recognise me, Harry?"

It was on the tip of Harry's tongue to sarcastically snap that if he recognised her he wouldn't be asking her who she was but she looked so sad and tired that he couldn't bring himself to hurt her even more than she clearly already had been and he was at last convinced of her sincerity so he slipped his wand back into his pocket. "I'm sorry, no."

"It's okay," the girl said dejectedly. "It's been a while. I think the last time we saw each other was a few days after your ninth birthday."

The truth beat down on Harry with the force of a bomb. "Danielle?" he gasped. "Dani, is that you?"

She nodded. "Hi."

When he was a kid Danielle Walters had been the only person in Surrey that hadn't allowed Dudley to frighten her out of being Harry's friend. From the time when she and her parents had moved into Privet Drive when she and Harry had been five she had been Harry's only real friend and probably the only reason he had gotten through his troubled childhood. The Walters house had been a sanctuary for him when things had gotten too bad at home, Dani was the one person that had spoken to him in the playground at school and her family would do things for him that his relatives never would have dreamed of. He'd gotten his first real birthday presents from them and it had been Mrs Walters that had accompanied him on his first day of middle school. All that had changed though, a few days after his ninth birthday. The Walters family had vanished without a trace, their house emptied out overnight and Harry had never heard from them again; until now.

"Dani, what happened to you?"

She carefully lowered herself to the ground, carefully cradling the baby in her arms and gestured for him to sit next to her which he did. "You're a wizard," she said bluntly. Harry turned around to look at her so fast he thought his head would snap off. Seeing his suspicion Dani quickly continued. "And I'm a witch."

Harry gaped at her. "Seriously?"

Dani nodded miserably. "Deadly. I'm a half-blood. Dad was a muggle and mother a pureblood. She was an aurour; I don't know whether you would have heard of her – Evelyn Walters."

"Oh my god. Your mother is _the _Evelyn Walters?" In the months after Barty Crouch Junior in disguise had suggested he should be an aurour he had read up on the practises of the elite dark wizard catchers, in particular the various books that had been written by Evelyn Walters who in the early days of the first war had looked for a while like she could be the one that would end up defeating Voldemort but that was before the bloody prophecy about him and his parents had been made, of course.

"Yeah," Dani told him. "The day we disappeared dad was killed by deatheaters and mum and I ran away to France. I wanted to try and get a message to you but there just wasn't time."

"It's okay," Harry said, gently laying a hand on her arm. He had been desperately lonely after she'd left and life in Surrey had never been the same again but he knew all to well what it was like to lose people you love to the wand of a deatheater and couldn't bring himself to condemn her for something that had been very definitely outside of her control. He eyed the baby in her arms – a boy that looked absolutely nothing like her except for the blue eyes – curiously and desperately wanted to ask questions about it but didn't think that she was ready to talk about that yet so went down a different track altogether. "So you went to France. What happened there? Did you go to Beabeautons?"

"Yeah. You don't know how much I wanted to get in touch with you when the Triwizard disaster was going on but it just wasn't safe," she said. "All I could do was watch you on the picture link that Madame Maxine transmitted to us back at the school."

"So what changed?"

Dani looked down at the sleeping baby and sighed sadly. "He did," she said quietly with a trace of tears in her voice. "This is my son. Mum and I may have gotten away from the deatheaters all those years ago but they never stopped looking for us and nine months ago they found us. Mum was killed and I……I was…….." She broke down in tears and looked down at the baby leaving Harry in no doubt what had happened to her. He seethed with anger and promised himself yet again that he would do whatever he had to do to end the war. Terrible things like this weren't going to stop happening until Voldemort was dead and the deatheaters at least rounded up but preferably just as dead as their master. "The deatheaters haven't stopped looking for me, either," Dani continued. "They want me dead but before they catch me I'll probably already be gone. I'm sick, Harry. I don't have that much longer."

"Oh hell," Harry said softly. "Dani, I'm so sorry."

To his surprise she looked utterly serene. "Don't be," she said calmly. After everything that's happened to me death doesn't scare me. "What does frighten me is the thought of what's going to happen to the baby after I'm gone. In spite of the way that he was brought to me I do care about him and want the best for him."

"What are you going to do? Where are you going to send him?" Harry said, almost afraid to ask. Even so Dani's answer shocked him to the core.

"I want you to adopt him."

**The End: **There's the first one done – please tell me what you think. Next Harry struggles to make a decision about what will happen to the baby.


	2. Chapter 2

FRIENDS FOREVER

**FRIENDS FOREVER**

**Summary: **In the summer after fifth year Harry is contacted by his childhood best friend and is asked a favour that will change is life forever.

**Disclaimer: **I own Danielle and Luke but everything else belongs to JKR. Thank you to those who gave me such great reviews – please keep them coming.

**CHAPTER TWO**

Harry choked. Surely he couldn't have heard what he just thought he did. Maybe his grief over Sirius had addled his brains and he was hallucinating. "You can't be serious," he spluttered.

Dani looked at him with the same, calm expression that she had been wearing earlier. "I know that it's a lot to ask but I can't think of anyone better than you to be my baby's father," she said. "We may not have been in touch for ages but you're still the only person that I would ever trust to do this. You're strong, Harry. You can do this and if you did the blood adoption ritual you'd have an actual family."

Harry looked at her thoughtfully, finally coming to terms with the fact that she wasn't kidding, that she really did want him to adopt her son. She clearly did remember him well, he thought. His desire for a real family was one of very few things that he still had that tied him to the person he had been when they'd known each other before. He remembered reading about the blood adoption ritual in charms at one stage and knew that if you performed it on a child early enough in its life the baby really would be your biological child and would legitimately bear your physical attributes, forever leaving the appearance he or she had been born with a thing of the past. On that thought alone, the thought that agreeing would mean he had an actual, real live family member that could never be taken away from him made him want to say that he would do it but there was so much more that he had to consider. He wouldn't even be sixteen for another few weeks for god's sake. Could he really raise a child? It wasn't that he considered himself a child – with everything that had happened to him he had grown up years ago – it was the fact that he was number one on Voldemort's hit list. Combined with the nutters that were no doubt hunting Dani her baby would be lucky to survive a week in his care.

"Have you got any idea how dangerous that would be?" he asked Dani. "I'm not sure who he'd be in more danger with as a parent – you or me."

"The deatheaters don't know that one of them got me pregnant," Dani said at once. "I've been on the move ever since mum died and I've used spells to keep my figure. As for you, you could try and keep him a secret until the end of the war or at least only tell the people that you trust with your life. You're really close to Dumbledore, aren't you?" Harry was surprised at the amount of thought she had put into this. Coming to him clearly hadn't been a spur of the moment decision. "Please, Harry," she added in a quiet voice. "If you say no then I don't know what I'll do. He'll probably have to go to an orphanage and I don't know if I can let that happen."

Harry could see the earnest sincerity in her tired eyes but he still couldn't bring himself to say yes yet. There was so much that he needed to think about. "I'm not saying no but I can't say yes yet, either," he said. "This is huge and I need some time to think about it." Dani looked downcast and clearly thought that this meant he was downright rejecting her request. At the moment Harry was leaning towards saying yes but until he had some time on his own to consider it he wasn't going to reassure her. It was getting late now and in the fading light he looked down at his watch. "How about we meet here first thing in the morning?" he suggested.

"Sure," she said, still looking more than a little depressed.

As he turned to walk away Harry felt like the worst person in the world. He had no idea where Dani and the baby were going to spend the night, hell he wasn't even sure if they had a place to spend the night but he told himself that until he'd had some time on his own to think he couldn't worry about that at all. He turned back around as a sudden thought occurred to him. He couldn't believe that he hadn't thought of asking it before when he was seriously considering making this child his own. "Dani!" he called out to her. "What's his name?"

Dani looked at him with an odd expression in her eyes. "He doesn't have one," she said. "He's only three days old so there's still time, yet. I figured that if you were going to be his father then it should be you that picked out his name."

"Right," Harry said dumbly, turning to walk away. Her words had really struck a chord within him. A father! If he agreed to her proposition then he would be someone's – that little baby's – father. The idea took his breath away. Could he really do it? Marriage and fatherhood, a real family was of course on the agenda presuming that he survived the war but was he ready now? Was he in the position to raise a child on his own? Financially he was – his parents had left him enough gold to last a lifetime – but could he do it on an emotional level? Was he in the right headspace to raise a child on his own? Also what would happen to him if he didn't survive the war? There was every chance that he wouldn't so could he, in all good conscience, make that little baby his own when chances were he wouldn't be around too much longer to raise him?

Man he had so much to think about.

He trudged back into number four and headed towards the stairs, hardly stopping to acknowledge his relatives who were just sitting down to dinner. He decided that because he had so much to think about he wouldn't inflict his company on them and would just go upstairs and eat something out of the daily food parcels that Mrs Weasley was sending him. What the hell was he going to do? He thought as he lay sprawled across his bed munching on some garlic bread and sipping some soup from a magically charged thermos. It was a difficult decision that he was going to have to make entirely on his own because if he agreed then at least until the war was over he would have to raise the child by himself. If he agreed the only way he could see to keep the child safe was to do as Dani suggested and keep him a secret from absolutely everyone until Voldemort was dead.

It had been a very long and tiring day but Harry didn't think that he'd gotten more than a couple of hours sleep that night. He wasn't all that bothered, though and the sarcastic side of his brain thought that if he was going to take a newborn into his care then he should more than likely get used to sleep deprivation. He lay awake for hours just going over every possible outcome in his mind, trying to scrupulously consider every possible consequence of each outcome in order to help make a decision. It wasn't an easy decision, though because for every reason he found not to take the baby there was a reason to do what Dani wanted and Harry soon found himself going around in circles. He couldn't come up with a definitive answer but was still leaning towards saying yes. More than anything Harry was being influenced by his desire for a family of his own. Having Dani and her parents around when he was a kid and Hermione and the Weasleys after he'd started Hogwarts had been nice and had given him a taste of what it was like to have a family but there had been little things that happened that had made him realise that no matter how often he was reassured that he was a part of them ultimately he was alone in the world and blood would always come first. If he was honest with himself he really wanted that kind of bond with a person, something that he would never get from the Dursleys and he imagined that it would be that way if he took the baby.

Against his better judgement he also found himself mulling over Dani's words that if he was going to be the baby's father then he should be the one to give him a name. It seemed so personal to be thinking about what he would call the child even before he had made a decision about whether or not to take him and it also meant that he would have an even harder time saying no if that was the decision he made but Harry couldn't help himself. For some reason he really liked the name Zachary and Oliver stuck out as well although he did toy with the idea naming the baby after his father or maybe even Sirius.

In the end he knew that there was really only one decision he could make. In some ways the decision had already been made for him and the baby had already been his from the moment Dani had given birth but Harry knew in his heart that he wouldn't have had it any other way. He had been quite taken with the idea from the second that Dani had put it in his head that going through with this would mean he finally got a family of his own and even if that hadn't been the case he didn't think that he would have been able to, in all good conscience, see the child of someone that had once meant so much to him be shipped off to an orphanage when he himself could take the baby and make sure that it didn't have the kind of childhood that he had been given by the Dursleys. That baby was going to be his and this decided, having received his daily package from Mrs Weasley he was out of the house before the Dursleys were even out of bed and heading towards the spot where he had arranged to meet Dani. With a bit of luck he wouldn't have long to wait for here there, they could have some breakfast together and talk things through about how they were going to handle this.

To his surprise she had beaten him there and was sitting in the exact same spot as the day before with the baby wailing in her arms, wearing the exact same clothes and looking decidedly more dishevelled. Harry vaguely wondered if she had ever left but the baby looked well cared for so she had to have gone somewhere at least temporarily. She jumped as he sat down beside her and the baby cried even louder. "Morning," he said.

She desperately tried to quieten the child but it was to no avail. "Morning," she echoed.

"Can I hold him?" Harry had only ever held a couple of babies before in his life and vaguely wondered if he was insane for doing this when he had so little experience but realised that there was no time like the present to start getting some experience. He bravely took the warm little body into his arms, cradling the head in one arm and the body in the other and rocked him gently, soon quietening him. "Hey there little man," he whispered, awestruck.

"He likes you," Dani said.

"I think so."

"Harry." Dani sounded really awkward. "I need to know. Have you made up your mind?"

Harry gave her a small smile and felt utterly confident in his answer. "I have," he said. "I'll do it."

**The End: **There's the next one done – please keep the reviews coming. Next the adoption is completed and Harry gives his new son a name.


End file.
